Flexible magnetic sheeting has been in use for a number of years to produce advertising specialty items commonly referred to as “refrigerator magnets”. These are used in both home and business environments and provide a long-lasting, effective, advertising medium when stuck to a metal surface, such as a refrigerator door, school locker, a filing cabinet and the like.
Traditionally, the magnetic sheeting has been manufactured as a thin, calendared sheet of rubber or other polymers containing strontium ferrite powder. The magnetization has normally been accomplished at the time of manufacture and consists of imparting a multi-pole array to provide a coercive (magnetic) force primarily to one side of the sheet. This magnetic material is sold in rolls or master sheets to advertising specialty converters who print them with an advertising message and then die cut into shapes for the advertiser. Printing was originally done by silk screening onto a vinyl surfaced sheet bonded to the magnetic polymer material. A subsequent process that became more popular was offset process printing onto a separate paper sheet and bonding the printed paper sheet to the magnetic sheet. This has been replaced to a large extent now by inkjet and digital printing due to the superior economy of digital printing for shorter production runs and the high quality now associated with digital printing. The printed paper has often been laminated with a clear thin polymer film for appearance and smudge resistance prior to bonding to the magnetic sheet. The traditional thickness of flexible magnetic sheeting is 0.3 mm to 0.75 mm thick. Typically these are produced on production lines 60 cm wide by the magnet manufacturer, and cut into master (press sheets) of 30 cm by 48 cm or larger for printing and bonding. The final bonded sheet is then die cut, into many smaller pieces from a size of 5 cm ×5 cm upwards, in conventional or decorative shapes.
One of the goals of the advertiser is to minimize the cost to have these magnets made, printed and delivered to the end-user. To minimize the cost of delivery, direct mail has been a desired choice, with automated “machinable” mail which can be scanned with automatic bar code reading equipment being the lowest cost. In addition, avoiding multiple steps in production, or complex or manual fabrication keeps costs lower. The simplest mail piece configuration, a postcard avoids the labour and material costs to fold, stuff, and seal and address envelopes and may qualify for lower mass mailing rates.
Another goal is to maximize the probability of the end user reading, and being motivated to keep the magnetic advertising piece, in that way increasing the probability of a purchase or use of the advertising or message, and a higher return on the advertising investment. Increasingly this involves being able to personalize the message to make it relevant to the end-user. With digital printing, unlike offset process or silk screening, it is feasible to have each mail piece unique in its content and images. Databases with information on demographics, past purchasing habits, household income, or such details as presence/absence of children or pets are widely utilized by advertisers. They are incorporated into variable data software in the digital printing process. In addition advertisers can direct end-users to personalized website addresses to enter contests or purchase services.
To obtain problem-free personalization it is advantageous not to have multiple pieces to assemble and in the case of magnets, to avoid trying to sort the die cut magnet pieces to match up the names with an envelope or insert.
With the above factors and the significant weight of the magnet, and the postal sorting problems of the inherent coercive force it has been difficult to achieve low cost mailings with magnets that were effective advertising mediums.
One example of an attempt to overcome these issues is provided in U.S. Pat. No. 5,458, 282, issued Oct. 17, 1995 to Crane Productions Inc. Here a magnetic sheet is bonded to one end of a postcard, which is perforated to allow the magnetic portion to be removed. The limitation with the teaching of this example of prior art is that it leaves a magnet force facing outward, potentially jamming sortation equipment, the rough perforated edge to the magnet, the dual thickness affecting stacking of the finished product, and the loss of advertising space taken up by the face of the plain brown magnetic sheet.
An improvement on this prior art by the same inventor, Martin, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,676,307, issued Oct. 14, 1997 to Crane Productions Inc., provides for a tape to be applied to the back of the postcard along the edge of the magnet sheet. This “ramp” is claimed to reduce mailing problems by making the stacking of the cards easier by reducing the sharp “bump” at the edge of the magnetic sheet adhered to the postcard which made the machine stacking of the postcard problematic.
In another patent by Martin, U.S. Pat. No. 6,024,278, issued Feb. 15, 2000 to Crane Productions, Inc. a mailable envelope containing coupons is described. In this prior art a cardstock envelope is constructed with a magnetic sheet on the front, said sheet having a printed face containing postal indicia and address information. In this envelope, coupons are placed with the magnetic sheet holding it to the metal surface. The limitation of this prior art is the cost of assembling a complex multiple part piece and the mailing weight involved.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,153,280, issued Nov. 28, 2000 to Magnet, LLC, discloses the use of a magnetic strip applied to the back of a postcard, which is internally perforated to allow a portion of the magnetic backed portion to be removed. This has the continuing problem of not being automated mail compatible, and has the same issue as the aforesaid prior art with the unattractive brown magnetic face taking up a significant portion of one side of the card.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,986,953, issued Jan. 17, 2006 to Ward/Kraft Inc., describes a one-side only printed magnetic sheet consisting of a printable paper surface, bonded to a pre-magnetized magnetic sheet layer which is bonded with a frangible adhesive across its complete surface to a non-printed release layer. This sheet is printed with souvenir photos or other remembrances on the removable portions. The resultant sheet after the detachable elements have been removed, retains adhesive residue resulting from the frangible coating, which may be sticky.
To seek another method, U.S. Pat. No. 7,063,258, issued Jun. 20, 2006 to Dan Karolewicz, provides for a small annular magnetic shape glued to the back of a card to provide it with the ability to hold itself to a metal surface. This non-planar combination is placed in an envelope for bulk mailing. This prior art has the limitation of rendering the card non-planar like the two earlier instances noted above, and requiring an envelope for mailing.
In common commercial use today, magnetic postcard mailers are marketed with a conventional cardstock postcard on which a printed magnetic shape has been placed and then held in place with an overlying clear laminate film. The magnet is released by using a sharp point or by bursting through a perforated line in the film around the magnet. Due to the loose nature of the printed magnets being dropped onto the cardstock, the magnet generally must be a generic non-personalized one. This method limits the personalization possible, and requires multiple processes to manufacture cards and magnets separately and then bond the two together.
Also in commercial use by advertisers, is the practice of creating a generic or personalized magnet in the shape of a credit card and then placing this with a removable adhesive securing it onto a folded letter, or card or pamphlet, which is then placed into an addressed window or plain envelope. This magnetic shape may be constructed of a thin magnetic paper laminate to minimize weight. However this still entails the costly issue of being able to match separately produced magnets with a personalized ad or letter and the fact that the removable advertisement piece, the magnet, is hidden inside an envelope, reducing the odds of its use as a refrigerator magnet.
Given the limitations of the prior art, there still remains a need for a more cost-effective and innovative way of creating a magnetic card suitable for mass mailing. More specifically, this innovation should, ideally, overcome most, if not all of the limitations of the prior art by:    (a) being able to be mailed without requiring its insertion into an envelope;    (b) when used as a mail postcard it has a low enough coercive field such that it can be processed by automated sorting equipment securing the lowest postal rates;    (c) being of a single, uniform and thin enough thickness to enable sorting and stacking without jamming up in machine fed sorting and stacking operations;    (d) being designed so that none of the areas of the piece as received are “dead space” consisting of the unprinted side of the magnet;    (e) being capable of printing so that both the retained magnetic piece and both sides of the card can be fully variable, if desired, enabling full personalization of the advertising piece;    (f) the card and the magnetic piece being manufactured in a single process so that it is not necessary to die cut magnets, strip them from their master sheet and then attach them to the card;    (g) designed so that the magnets may be directly printed in a (digital, inkjet or offset) printing press on a printable surface, avoiding the necessity of printing a sheet of paper and then bonding the printed paper to the magnetic sheeting;    (h) designed so that the coercive forces can be adjusted in the magnetic sheet so that a higher force may be used if the card is handed out and a lower one if the card is processed by a postal service with stringent specifications or more magnet sensitive processing equipment; and    (i) designed so that the coercive force can be imparted to a higher or lesser degree in selected portions of the sheet. In this way the non-removable portion may have less magnetic force, further facilitating the use of the card in postal machine sorting operations.    (j) designed so that the end user immediately views the removable magnetic piece of lasting advertising value, and sees a message providing an incentive to remove it to reveal a hidden offer, prize or message.
A magnetic card product with most or all of these advancements would offer significant advantages and overcome the limitations of the prior art as described above.